Missing plane search stepped up

The search for the missing AirAsia jet carrying 162 people that disappeared more than 24 hours ago on a flight from Indonesia to Singapore expanded today with planes and ships from several countries taking part.

First Admiral Sigit Setiayana, the Naval Aviation Centre commander at the Surabaya air force base, said 12 navy ships, five planes, three helicopters and a number of warships were talking part, along with ships and planes from Singapore and Malaysia. The Australian Air Force also sent a search plane.

He said visibility was good: “God willing, we can find it soon.”

AirAsia Flight 8501 vanished in airspace thick with storm clouds on its way from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore. Searchers had to fight against heavy rain yesterday before work was suspended due to darkness.

The plane’s disappearance and suspected crash caps an astonishingly tragic year for air travel in south-east Asia.

The Malaysia-based carrier’s loss comes on top of the still-unexplained disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in March and the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July over Ukraine.

At the Surabaya airport, passengers’ relatives pored over the plane’s manifest, crying and embracing.

Nias Adityas, a housewife from Surabaya, was overcome with grief when she found the name of her husband, Nanang Priowidodo, on the list.

The 43-year-old tour agent had been taking a family of four on a trip to Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia’s Lombok island, and had been happy to get the work.

“He just told me, ‘Praise God, this new year brings a lot of good fortune,'” she recalled, holding her grandson tight while weeping uncontrollably.

Nearly all the passengers and crew are Indonesians, who are frequent visitors to Singapore, particularly on holidays.

The Airbus A320 took off yesterday morning from Indonesia’s second-largest city and was about halfway to Singapore when it vanished from radar. The jet had been airborne for about 42 minutes.

There was no distress signal from the twin-engine, single-aisle plane, said Djoko Murjatmodjo, Indonesia’s acting director general of transportation.

The last communication between the cockpit and air traffic control was at 6.13am local time (11.13pm GMT Saturday), when one of the pilots asked to increase altitude from 32,000ft to 38,000ft, Mr Murjatmodjo said.

The jet was last seen on radar at 6.16am local time, and was gone a minute later, he told reporters.

Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia launched a search-and-rescue operation near Belitung island in the Java Sea, the area where the airliner lost contact with the ground.

AirAsia group chief executive Tony Fernandes flew to Surabaya and told a news conference that the focus for now should be on the search and the families rather than the cause of the incident.

“We have no idea at the moment what went wrong,” said Mr Fernandes, a Malaysian businessman who founded the low-cost carrier in 2001. “Let’s not speculate at the moment.”

Malaysia-based AirAsia has a good safety record and had never lost a plane.

But Malaysia itself has already endured a catastrophic year, with 239 people still missing from Flight 370 and all 298 people aboard Flight 17 killed when it was shot down over rebel-held territory in Ukraine.

AirAsia said Flight 8501 was on its submitted flight plan but had requested a change due to weather.

Sunardi, a forecaster at Indonesia’s Meteorology and Geophysics Agency, said dense storm clouds were detected up to 44,000ft in the area at the time.

“There could have been turbulence, lightning and vertical as well as horizontal strong winds within such clouds,” said Sunardi, who like many Indonesians uses only one name.

The plane had an Indonesian captain, Iryanto, who uses one name, and a French co-pilot, five cabin crew members and 155 passengers, including 16 children and one infant, the airline said in a statement.

Among the passengers were three South Koreans, a Malaysian, a British national and his two-year-old Singaporean daughter. The rest were Indonesians.

AirAsia said the captain more than 20,000 flying hours, of which 6,100 were with AirAisa on the Airbus 320. The first officer had 2,275 flying hours.

At Iryanto’s house in the East Java town of Sidoarjo, neighbours, relatives and friends gathered to pray and recite the Quran to support the distraught family.

Their desperate cries were so loud, they could sometimes be heard outside where three LCD televisions had been set up to monitor search developments.

“He is a good man. That’s why people here appointed him as our neighbourhood chief for the last two years,” said Bagianto Djoyonegoro, a friend and neighbour, adding that despite being busy with his job, Iryanto was always very active in the community and attentive to the needs of the people around him.

Many recalled him as an experienced Air Force pilot who flew F-16 fighter jets before becoming a commercial airline pilot.

At Surabaya airport, dozens of relatives sat in a room waiting for news, many of them talking on mobile phones and crying.

Dimas, who goes by one name, said his wife, 30-year-old Ratri Sri Andriani, had been on the flight to lead a group of 25 Indonesian tourists on a trip to Singapore and Malaysia. He was holding out hope that the plane had made an emergency landing.

“We can just pray and hope that all those aboard are safe,” said Dimas, who was surrounded by Ratri’s parents and friends at the airport crisis centre.

The missing aircraft was delivered to AirAsia in October 2008, and the plane had accumulated about 23,000 flight hours during some 13,600 flights, Airbus said in a statement.

The aircraft had last undergone scheduled maintenance on November 16, according to AirAsia.

The airline, which has dominated cheap travel in south-east Asia for years, flies short routes of just a few hours, connecting the region’s large cities. Recently, it has tried to expand into long-distance flying through sister airline AirAsia X.

The A320 family of jets, which includes the A319 and A321, has a good safety record, with just 0.14 fatal accidents per million take-offs, according to a safety study published by Boeing in August.

Flight 8501 disappeared while at its cruising altitude, which is usually the safest part of a trip. Just 10% of fatal crashes from 2004 to 2013 occurred while a plane was in that stage of flight, the safety report said.